Our Work / NREC

Consolidation to Close
cycle reduced by 3
weeks

Client  NREC :: Sector Construction & Real Estate

Challenge

Quarterly close process taking 4 – 5 weeks to complete.

NREC has more than 45 different subsidiaries spread across the Middle East and Africa. The consolidation process was being carried out manually in a spreadsheet environment, which was taking excessive amounts of time and left reports and results open to human error. Too much time was being spent crunching the numbers and too little actually analysing the data.

Reporting for variance analysis and management was eating up a lot of the Finance department’s resources. The budgeting system was manually managed and therefore not robust.

Confidence and information is critical...

Managing performance, planning and reporting in the Real Estate sector brings a constant challenge from both internal and external factors, confidence in information is critical.

Teddy Murphy, CEO, Miagen

Solution

Move from old world FP&A to technology empowered Consolidation & Budgeting.

NREC sought to replace their complex spreadsheet-based budget process with a smarter solution. They selected the Adaptive Planning platform and chose Miagen as their implementation partner.

Miagen’s specialist Construction & Real Estate team presented a bespoke solution and integrated process to connect all areas of the organization, while delivering a powerful, intuitive Planning and Consolidation model which could be speedily implemented and future proofed for expansion and growth. The team then helped NREC map and steer their course from beginning to end.

The whole implementation was completed in 6 weeks using Miagen's rapid implementation methodology.

Consolidation

The consolidation solution required Miagen to build a complex model which could cater for 160 organisational units across 45 subsidiary companies, including 3 groups and 8 companies with minority or other ownership interests. The new model works with eight different currencies, two of which are for reporting. Over 40 historical exchange rates are captured for share capital and retained earnings translation.

Eliminations covered more than 100 intercompany transaction types including investment and share capital eliminations. The complete solution design resulted in a reduction of 400 different matching accounts across the group companies.

Planning & Budgeting

Miagen built separate models for sales, direct costs, OpEx, other income, personnel planning, CapEx planning, cash flow, income statement and balance sheet, which all smoothly join together to form the planning and budgeting solution for the entire group.

Reporting

Senior executives can now monitor actual and planned performance of key operational and strategic metrics through tailored dashboards. The preparation of monthly reporting packs - including profit & loss, cash flow and balance sheet with actual, plan and forecast data for all departments and companies, is automated.

Outcome

Consolidation to Close cycle reduced by three weeks.

Effortless data collection and reconciliation

The Miagen consolidation solution allows data to be imported from source systems automatically, eliminating the effort and risk of error associated with manual entry. The group chart of accounts was designed to allow for ease of reconciliation and data drill down.

Transparent intercompany reconciliations

Intercompany reconciliation was designed to have rules for elimination and multi-currency handling, making the whole process much more simple and transparent.

Simplified budgeting process

The budgeting process is now significantly more straightforward, with users across the organization directly submitting data relating to Revenue, Direct Costs and OpEx. This centralised and distributed control means there’s a single source of data, with real-time input.

User configurable reporting

Customized reports are now quick and easy to produce, thanks to Adaptive’s configuring and self-reporting features. People can create and run their own customised reports at will.

Gave us solutions...

The experience working with the Miagen team was very good. They were receptive to all our requirements, walked us through the planning phase, could see our problems and gave us solutions.

Seby Varghese, Finance Manager, NREC